DNS? Secondary?
What's all this gibberish?

If you are not too familiar with DNS, all these terms might seem gibberish to you.

This is a short guide into the (relevant parts of) DNS. If you want more background, you might want to start at Wikipedia's DNS article, for example.

So, what does this DNS thing do?

DNS, the Domain Name System, is a naming system. All elements added together, it basically allows someone to look up a name on the internet, like soliddns.net, and get data about that, like the IP address. Besides this, there are also records to map an IP address to a name, find mail servers for a domain, delegate responsibility for a part of the zone to a different set of name servers and several other tasks.

A zone is a list of records for, for example, a domain. So, soliddns.net. is a zone, but so is net.. The net. zone delegates soliddns.net. to the Solid DNS name servers with NS records.

Tell me about DNS servers

DNS servers, also called name servers, are servers that answer DNS queries. DNS servers can be resolvers, authoritative, or both. Only authoritative name servers are relevant for Solid DNS - these are able to answer queries authoritatively for one or more zones.

Why do I need multiple?

The reachability of your domain depends on the DNS servers. If all your DNS servers go offline, your zone practically disappears from the internet. This means no one will get answers to queries for your zone, and mail to you may be lost.

Because of this, it is strongly recommended to have at least two, preferably three, DNS servers for a domain.

So, how do these different servers sync?

When one zone is served by multiple DNS servers, one of these is commonly the master. The master has the authoritative copy of the zone and all changes are first done on the master.

The other DNS servers are the slaves. They get a copy of the zone from the master, and serve it to users. Transferring the zone is done with a zone transfer, or AXFR query.

The slaves periodically, or on request, check the serial on the master, which is part if the SOA record. If the serial on the master is different, they will ask the master for a new copy of the zone.

All Solid DNS servers function as slave of a master.

Where does your service come into all of this?

Solid DNS provides secondary name servers for any zone you like. We build friendly and powerful user interfaces and allow you do adopt the latest technologies, mainly IPv6 and DNSSEC.

You can read more about this in: Why Solid DNS: the gory details. That's where we explain the advantages of Solid DNS over other solutions, with some background on how they work.

Sounds great, how do I get started?

The tutorial will guide you through the process of configuring your name server and zone to work with Solid DNS.